SA Health plans statewide ERP system

South Australia's Department of Health has gone to market for the supply and implementation of an enterprise resource planning and asset management system to be deployed statewide across health institutions.

South Australia's Department of Health has gone to market for the supply and implementation of an enterprise resource planning and asset management system to be deployed statewide across health institutions.

(Credit: ZDNet.com.au)

The sought systems would include financial management, supply
chain and warehousing, asset management, budgeting and business
intelligence functions, although no funds had been set aside for asset
management as yet, with the information received in a response set to
make a business case for government money.

Currently the state's various health services and hospitals use
different systems for their finances, supply chain management and
asset management, including in-house systems, Masterpiece, Homer,
Harmony, Qantel, IBA, SAMIS, spreadsheets, HIMS and others.

The statewide implementation of these new systems would ideally
make no allowance for local versions, according to the tender documents, with the aim of realising economies of scale
in support personnel, infrastructure and licensing costs. The project aims to provide users
with better access to information as well as carrying out transactions more consistently and streamlining processes.

The project would also allow South Australia to gain a tidy one-upmanship on other
states. "It is important to emphasis that a statewide operating
model will place the SA Health sector substantially ahead of its
counterparts in terms of process and data standardisation," the
tender documents said.

The SA tender documents touched on the South Australian Government's broader shared
service initiative, saying that although the government's
direction on financial and supply chain systems had not been set,
the ease of integration with any future shared services plans was
to be considered. It could even benefit the supplier.

"Respondents to this invitation are to note and take into
consideration in their response that the preferred solution may
become the preferred solution across-government and/or utilised by
other government agencies in South Australia," the tender
documents said.

Another SA Health goal which the system would have to work with
was procurement reform to reduce the $1 billion it intended to
spend over the next year on supplies and services. At the moment
over 60 per cent of products supplied are outside the hospital's
inventory management and reordering systems. A national product
catalogue developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority has been identified to help with
this problem.

The target date for operational use of the systems is 1 July
2010. SA Health employs around 27,800 staff including
the four health regions, the ambulance service and its own head office.

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